


Outside the Circle

by bitochondria



Category: True Detective
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Explicit Language, Friends to Lovers, Frottage, Homophobic Language, Horrible Old Men Trying to Be A Little Better, Horrible Old Men in Love, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Marty does a Gay Panic for four months, POV Third Person Limited, Past Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Past Relationship(s), Past Violence, Pining, Post-Canon, Roommates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-20
Updated: 2020-04-20
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:34:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23756950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bitochondria/pseuds/bitochondria
Summary: Marty told Rust he'd have a place to stay after he left the hospital, and he meant it. He hadn't necessarily been expecting a week or two of recuperation to turn into a permanent kind of roommates situation, but Rust seems to have no intention of moving out, and Marty has no intention of kicking him out, either, for reasons he can't quite manage to articulate.Which is to say, Rust has always been kind of prescient-- but Marty might not have guessed just how on the nose his joke about getting engaged was.
Relationships: Rustin "Rust" Cohle/Martin "Marty" Hart
Comments: 12
Kudos: 110





	1. Week Two

**Author's Note:**

> To my oldest and dearest friend: this is your fault.
> 
> I'm sorry I didn't join you on this journey sooner, and I hope I did these terrible old men justice.
> 
> <3

When he walked into his bathroom, Marty blurted, “Rust, what the hell are you doing?”

“Changing my bandages,” Rust stated, blithe as usual. 

Marty should have known better than to ask Rust a question by means of implication rather than direct statement, but he had been thrown off guard by the pile of bloodied bandages on the side of the bathtub, and the sink, filled nearly to overflowing with pink-tinged water. 

He asked his implied question aloud: “Why?”

“Well,” Rust began, his eyebrows raising ever-so-slightly as his chin dipped down, “Sepsis is among the most unpleasant possible ways to die, and I would prefer to avoid that.” 

Marty breathed out slowly through his nose, jaw clenched. He tried not to be angry, even though that was clearly an answer to a different  _ why _ than the one he was asking. 

“I  _ mean _ ,” he bit, trying to soften his tone before he continued, “Why not wait for the nurse?” 

Rust stopped his unravelling for a moment and glanced at Marty. “I told her not to come. I’m fine doing this myself.” 

“No,” Marty shook his head. “We’re not doing that. None of this self-destructive bullshit, not while—” 

“It’s not self-destructive behavior, Marty. I’ve just done this enough times that I don’t need some gawking stranger coming in here to do it for me.”

“She’s a  _ nurse _ , for fuck’s sake! She ain’t gonna be gawking.”

Rust dipped his fingers, red and slimy, in the sink. Blood swirled into the water. He shook them off and continued peeling bandages, dexterity regained with less gore.

“Yes, but she’s also twenty-two and keeps asking me about…” He scrunched his mouth up to one side. “This scar and that scar and what it was like to be a police officer, and I just… would rather avoid discussing these topics of conversation with someone who is incapable of really hearing about them.” 

That was fair, Marty acquiesced. She had been excitable— all wrapped up in some belief in heroes and justice. Rust didn’t really play nice with that type.

“Fine,” he nodded, looking off to the side, palms out in a gesture halfway between a shrug and supplication. “At least let me help, then.”

Rust looked Marty in the eye and bit the inside of his cheek, his hands hovering in front of his abdomen, laced through with gauze. He looked down at the sink and nodded, just barely. “Alright. But go wash your fucking hands first.”


	2. Week Four

“So what’s with the flower child look, anyway?” 

Rust looked up from his book with mild confusion, nearly unreadable. He glanced at the TV for a moment, as if that was going to provide context for the question. 

Marty’s arm was resting behind him on the back of the couch, so without shifting, he gave Rust’s ponytail a tug.

“Were you going for a specific look, or just too lazy to get it cut?”

“Too lazy, I guess,” Rust muttered without inflection. As soon as he said it, Marty realized that ‘too depressed’ was probably the real answer, and regretted his choice of phrasing. Rust closed his book. “Why, is there a uniform code here? You got a ‘hippies use back door’ sign I missed?”

Marty snorted. “Nah.” He looked at Rust’s gaunt face, just on the border of a smile. He still had his hair between his fingers and his thumb, significantly softer than he would have expected. Not like a girl’s hair— he sure as hell wasn’t filling Marty’s shower up with Herbal Essences— but not as coarse as he’d have guessed. An untucked curl rested on Rust’s cheek. 

“I like it, is all.”

At this, Rust slowly turned his head towards Marty, a smirk curling the corners of his mouth. “I’m flattered,” he mocked, flatly, an unblinking stare accompanying his words, “But I’m not as easy as those college girls you used to fuck around with.”

“Fuck off,” Marty spat, removing his arm from the back of the couch. He unconsciously shifted his weight away from Rust, even though he  _ did  _ think it was kind of funny. “Last time I pay  _ you _ a compliment.” 

Rust opened his book again, smiling in earnest. 

Marty turned back to the TV, arms crossed.

Eyes still on the page, Rust chuckled. “How  _ did  _ you get so much tail with lines like that? Beautiful women lining up the block to suck your dick, and you’re the type to think ‘nice tits’ is the height of fuckin’ romance.”

“You know that ain’t how I meant it,” Marty retorted, jutting his chin out. He found a clenched jaw prevented his face from doing any of the other things it wanted to do— sneer, smile. Stammer nervously. 

His ears and neck felt a little hot.

The same way they had when Rust had made the engagement crack back at the hospital. It was mostly embarrassment, just feeling foolish, but— 

He elbowed Rust. 

“You’re a fucking degenerate.” 

Rust laughed, a quiet exhale, still looking down at his book.

—but it was a little more than that, too. 

He cleared his throat and got up from the couch, suddenly unable to look his friend in the eye..

“You want coffee, y’fucking beatnik?” 

Another quiet chuckle issued from Rust’s vicinity.

Marty tried not to think about why that noise made him smile so easily.


	3. Week Five

Back in '95, when Maggie kicked him out, the brief period Marty had spent living with Rust had been largely disconcerting and uncomfortable. Rust’s erratic behavior was harder to look away from in a two room apartment, and his lack of belongings or even furniture made Marty feel a little like a criminal. Or a monk. They argued frequently. Rust paced around shirtless with a bottle of Jameson or something worse, back on the wagon. Marty alternated between rage poisoning and drunken self-pity. 

Even so, he remembered one night, leaning on Rust’s little kitchenette counter, watching him make ersatz track marks— he had thought, eyes on the veins in his arm,  _ “I would take a bullet for this asshole.” _

The thought had surprised him so much he had almost choked on his drink. He hadn’t known it was true until he had thought it, and then he couldn’t think about it any longer without his heart hammering in his chest. Somehow, for reasons he could not articulate, even realizing he cared about his partner had been disconcerting and uncomfortable.

Now, he found himself almost enjoying Rust’s company. More than almost, most of the time. They still argued, and occasionally Rust still wandered around without a shirt on, and his behavior was still frequently erratic, but for whatever reason, they just weren’t driving each other crazy. Their arguments were more philosophical disagreements now, and when they (daily) told each other to fuck off, it was usually with a smirk or an elbow to the ribs rather than an implied threat of violence. Rust actually smiled— hell, laughed— occasionally. 

Initially, Marty had thought it was nice just having someone to talk to. 

But sometimes, when Rust said or did something real particular to his own brand of weirdness— when he philosophized over a pan of frying eggs or rambled on about some theory he had been reading about or described a damn color as a taste or some other bullshit like that— Marty found himself thinking that it was specifically nice having  _ Rust _ around. 

He hadn’t realized how much he had missed him. 

Everything else about how he left— screwing Maggie, quitting the force, burning every goddamn bridge— it had made him too angry to think straight. And by the time he could have started picking through the torched remains of his feelings, the rest of his life was in such disarray that it no longer mattered. And then… it was all too much, all too sad, all too late. 

He had tried not to think about him these past few years.

“Marty.”

He raised his eyebrows in embarrassed surprise, turning his gaze elsewhere before letting it snap back to Rust. He was looking at something on the computer, thank the lord. Marty hadn’t even realized he’d been staring at him. 

“What’s up?”

“C’mere.” He beckoned Marty over to the computer. 

Technically he was still supposed to be on rest, but they were both too antsy to spend another week ordering takeout and watching baseball. They had gone into the office to pick through some cold cases, figuring at least it’d keep them busy.

Marty leaned on the back of Rust’s chair, looking over his shoulder.

“This fucker,” Rust pointed, twice, “He was picked up a few years back on a tip from a neighbor that he’d poisoned their dog. Charges were dropped, but the next few months, there was a rash of antifreeze deaths in pets in—” He switched to a different tab. “This radius.”

“Rust, I feel as bad about dead kitty-cats as the next guy, but we’re not here to get ourselves a job with animal control.”

Rust kept talking before Marty could finish.

“See this house, here? Old woman there died of antifreeze poisoning, too.” He opened the police report. “It was reported as accidental— she lived alone, the bottle of antifreeze was in her pantry, she had a history of dementia symptoms— but I would bet you dinner that she was part of a pattern of escalation.” He spun the chair around and Marty stuffed his hands in his pockets. Rust looked up at him, head tilted slightly to the right.

“Alright. But that was six years ago. If he stopped, why start again now?”

“I don’t think he did stop. I think he’s just real careful.” 

Marty leaned in to look at the screen. He squinted over Rust’s shoulder, his arm crossed over his friend's chest. “Shit. He works for the census?” 

“Certainly would make it easier to figure out who no one’s going to miss.” Rust looked up, his face very close to Marty’s. “You need fuckin’ reading glasses, don’t you.”

Marty straightened, away from the computer and away from Rust. He blinked, trying to read the computer screen from where he stood. “Yeah, probably.”

“Is it safe for you to be operating a firearm?"

"My distance vision is fine, you asshole."

"I'm happy to help you read the menu if we get dinner," Rust offered, unsmiling.

"I'm gonna roll you out the door and into the street." 

"Should I drive us home?" Rust pursed his lips slightly in false concern. 

Marty intended to be angry, or at least mildly perturbed, but Rust's phrasing had caught him totally off guard. He was usually so meticulous in his word choices. It was always 'your apartment' or 'Marty's place.'  _ Home  _ sounded like a newly learned vocabulary word in his mouth. 

“Alright, wiseass.” Marty crossed his arms, finding himself a little sweaty and self-conscious. “Let’s get some names for tomorrow, and then we’ll go get that dinner.” 

Rust nodded and spun the office chair back around. 

“You can pick something for me if it’s fine print,” Marty sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose, trying to pinch away the strange feeling that had crept over his body. 

Scribbling information down in his notebook, Rust muttered, “I think you’d look handsome in glasses.”

The creeping feeling spread faster. 

He swallowed and tossed the volley back. 

“F’your gonna flirt with me, I hope dinner’s on you tonight.” He scrunched his mouth to one side and glared.

Rust closed his ledger and looked at Marty over the back of the chair. He smiled an inscrutable smile. “It’s a date.”


	4. Week Seven

Marty managed to catch an escaping egg before it rolled off the counter, but he dropped the whisk on the floor in the process. 

He hadn’t even known he had  _ owned _ a whisk. 

After one week where they had ordered four nights of takeout in a row, he had made a crack about his cholesterol, and Rust had given him a sidelong glance dripping with pity and derision. 

“Do you know how to fucking cook  _ anything _ ?” 

Marty had thought seriously about what he was, in fact, capable of cooking— burgers. Steak— anything on the grill, really— plain pasta, sandwiches. Uncle Ben’s. He had opened his mouth to speak but Rust had interrupted.

He preempted him with an acid, “Grilling and Rice-A-Roni don’t count.”

“Why the fuck doesn’t grilling count?”

“You got a grill in here?” 

Since then, Rust had been trying to teach him some culinary basics, to varied success. Rust had disturbingly good knife skills, but he wasn’t exactly a Michelin-starred chef, either. He seemed like he had a grasp on the science behind everything, but his ‘recipes’ were more like grocery lists, and his seasoning was haphazard at best. As a chef, he was sufficient. As a teacher, he was vague and impatient, and Marty wanted to throttle him. Nonetheless, with his help Marty had managed to pin down stir fry and omelettes; everything outside those two milieu was still outside his grasp. 

“So what am I doing next?”

“Broccoli.” Rust leaned against the counter, a cup of coffee in hand. He was consistently up on his feet more these days, and Marty no longer winced every time he saw him bend over or lift anything heavier than a cereal box. 

Marty picked the whisk up from the floor and threw it in the sink.

“You’re still going to need that,” Rust cautioned. 

Marty tossed handfuls of broccoli into a sizzling pan of onions. “You wash it, then.”

“I’m supervising.” 

“You fuckin’  _ live _ to make my life harder, don’t you.” Marty stirred the pan and went over to the sink to deal with the whisk. A decade and change too late, he could see why sometimes asking ‘what’s for dinner’ had put Maggie in a fugue state for the rest of the evening. Cooking was a pain in the goddamn ass. 

He tossed the whisk on the drying rack and stirred the pan again.

“This is torture, plain and simple,” Marty grumbled, terrified of burning something again. 

Rust drained the rest of his coffee. “How the fuck did any woman ever put up with you for more than thirty-six hours.” 

“You’re no prize, either.”

“I don’t claim to be.” He placed his cup down and crossed his arms, eyes on Marty in a way that made the hair on his neck raise. “I just puzzle, still, over your ability to convince otherwise intelligent women to get into bed with you despite your personality.” 

Marty looked back at him over his shoulder. The bastard was smiling, just his eyes and a very subtle lift of his cheeks. Marty flipped him off and kept stirring.

“Pretty sure that ability packed up and left with the rest of my hair,” he laughed, with only the tiniest hint of bitterness, “so don’t get too jealous, there.” 

As soon as he said it he feared he was in for a lecture; Rust was, as far as Marty could tell, incapable of real jealousy. It hadn’t even been why he fucked Maggie, if his explanation was to be believed. 

But no lecture was forthcoming. 

“Nah, nothing like that.” He licked his lower lip, his mouth partially open in thought. “I’m honestly curious. Human nature being what it is—”

“Oh, Jesus. Before you start, when will I know this is done?” 

“It’ll brown if y’just leave it alone for thirty seconds. Try that.”

“Fine.” Marty put down the spatula and turned to Rust. He rolled his eyes, pretending he didn’t want to hear whatever it was he had to say. “Tell me about ‘human nature.’” 

“It’s in our nature to fill the holes we have with…” He shrugged with just his hands. “Things, people. Certain behaviors. Every person on this earth has something that eats away at them, something they feel like they’re missing or that they need, be it conscious or un, and…” He bit the inside of his cheek, looking briefly down at the floor. “Sometimes that causes us to do stupid fucking shit, like steal, or lie, or cheat.”

“So you think women sleep with me to fill some kind of hole—” He crushed his eyes and mouth closed and itched the side of his nose, trying not to smile. 

Rust exhaled slowly. “Psychological holes, Martin. Don’t be a child.”

“Well, I mean. In my experience, getting a hole filled  _ was _ usually what they wanted out of the bargain.”

“That shit’s exactly what I’m fucking talking about— your personality should make you inherently repulsive to any reasonable woman.” Rust glared. “And I wasn’t done talking,” 

“Alright, alright. Psychological swiss cheese, I hear you.”

“I had always assumed this was the phenomenon at play with Lisa and Beth, but it never explained Maggie.” He pointed at the stovetop. “Add the ham, and whisk the eggs.” 

Marty tossed the cubes of ham into the skillet and stirred as he listened.

Rust got quiet— quieter than usual— as he spoke. “That’s the part I struggle with, I think. People coming together to find that missing piece, or fill an emptiness— I understand that. Filling a need is instinctual— y’know, we all need to eat. Clinging to each other like burrs, hooking yourself into a space where you fit, all that makes sense.” He paused, and Marty could hear him shifting against the counter. “It’s  _ magnetism _ that fucks me up.” 

Before he started cracking eggs, Marty glanced back at Rust. He was staring at him dead-on. Marty’s stomach felt, quite suddenly, like a rag getting wrung out.

“When one person is using another person to fill a need, they’re performing a basic animal task, even if they  _ think _ it’s something deeper than that.”

“Is this an altruism thing? Because I’m not arguing with you again about whether or not altruism exists, Rust.” The egg he was cracking broke wrong, sending bits of shell into the bowl. “Mother fucking— ” 

“This hasn’t got anything to do with altruism.” Rust sighed. “Use the empty eggshell.”

“What?”

“Don’t use your fingers, scoop out the broken bits with the shell.”

“Oh.” 

“It’s about  _ bonds _ , Marty. I’m saying that important relationships between humans fall into certain categories— we’re genetically hardwired to protect our kin, of course, and then there are people with whom we fill a need, and then… there’s a category that makes no biological sense.”

Rust’s eggshell suggestion worked, so Marty was back to cracking eggs. He had no idea where Rust was going with any of this, but his philosophical tangents were always interesting, even when they were dead wrong. The whole biological imperative angle had always rankled, but since he was no longer weaponizing his sermons to take Marty down a peg, it seemed less important to argue. On top of that, Marty had noticed Rust questioning his own conclusions a lot more, recently— it felt like he was expanding the definitions of his system.

And, to the tune of his stomach wringing itself again, Marty admitted, he kind of liked just hearing him talk.

“You ever met someone,” Rust started again, still watching Marty with an intense, level gaze, “who you know, immediately,  _ ‘this person is going to matter to me _ ?’”

“What, like… love at first sight or some bullshit?”

“I’m not talking about lust.”

“I don’t know, then. What do you mean, ‘matter?’”

Rust paused, trying to collect his words. “That feeling when… you meet someone, and you feel like you’ve met already, somehow. Not like deja vu, but like…” He pinched his thumb and forefinger together in front of him, one eye squinted partially shut, like he was trying to catch a mote of dust. “Like you already  _ know  _ them. Not that you know anything  _ about  _ them, just… a sense of temporal displacement, like you’re already aware that someday this person is going to mean something to you, and because of that, you…  _ feel _ something for them, even though there’s no reason to, yet.”

Marty turned around to face Rust, the bowl of eggs in his hands. He whisked as he spoke. “Like an instant rapport.”

Rust lit up with Marty’s recognition, looking a little like he had back in ‘95 when he would perform observational calculus on a case. “Sometimes, yes. Like you’re already friends even though there’s no way you could be.” He pointed rapidly at Marty. “But not always— sometimes it’s more like… foreshadowing, almost. Or like in an old cartoon, when someone goes to get a book off a bookshelf, you always know which one it’s going to be, because it’s drawn differently. Some people are like that.”

“Some people are like books in an old cartoon. You lost me, Rust.”

“Well, that’s how it was with…” Rust stopped dead in his speech, closed his mouth, and blinked. “Just… the sense that someone has some kind of importance to you, before you come to see why they’re important. And you’re not kin, and you’re not using them to smooth out your psychological swiss cheese.” He crossed one leg in front of the other, shifting his weight. “They just  _ matter _ to you.”

They looked at each other across the kitchen. 

Involuntarily, Marty stopped whisking, and just watched Rust’s face. Rust was unblinking, his face tensely expressionless. He tried to remember the first day they met, but any memories of that day had long been colored by seventeen years of knowing. But he thought about his spontaneous realization, all those years ago, that he would be willing to die for Rust, even though he frankly didn’t always like him. And he thought about how easily Rust convinced him to revisit the case, despite the years, despite the animosity. 

The feeling in his stomach— churning, but not pain— like someone was trying to make a damn frittata  _ inside  _ him— continued with increasing fervor. 

That’s what Rust was, to him. One of those  _ people who mattered _ . 

Was that what Rust was trying to say to him? That he felt— that he put him in the same category? 

Marty started whisking again, hard enough that egg sloshed up the side of the bowl and onto the floor. 

He grinned, all jocularity and none of his inner turmoil. “Sounds like you’re starting to figure out ‘friendship,’ there, Rust.”

“Fuck off, Marty,” Rust groaned, shifting his stance again with a loll of his head and a roll of his eyes. “Were you and Maggie ever  _ friends _ ?”

The trajectory of the conversation cleared, and Marty’s stomach dropped. He had been talking about him and Maggie, of course— that’s where this had started. 

He bit the inside of his cheek. 

“That’s a weird kind of question, ‘was I ever friends with my wife.’ How the hell am I supposed to answer that?”

Rust pointed to the bowl. “Half a cup of milk, pinch of salt.” 

“Is anyone really  _ friends _ with their spouse?” He stuck the bowl down on the counter and went to the fridge. 

“I would assume the diminishing percentage of people who don’t get divorced but who are also not coerced to stay together by financial or religious circumstances,” Rust sighed. 

“Yeesh.”

“Yeah.”

Marty looked down at his bowl of eggs and milk. 

“Well, now what?”


	5. Week Eight

“Martin?” 

Marty squeezed the phone between his shoulder and his ear. He glanced at Rust, who was seated at Marty’s desk, taking notes on something. Maggie had called a handful of times since his hospitalization, vaguely concerned about his physical well-being. Once a nurse, and all that. Didn’t make it any less awkward.

“Hey Maggie,” he responded, watching Rust out of the corner of his eye. 

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine. Been back at work for a while. Audrey called me last week, y’know? That was real nice. She sounded good. How you doing?”

“Oh, you know. Busy.'' She abruptly shifted gears without giving any personal information. “Hey, this is going to sound really bizarre,” she sighed, “But a patient just gave me fifteen pounds of zucchini and I’m about to drive past your building, so I thought I’d offer, if you have any use for them.”

“...sssure,” he hesitated. “There’s no one else who’d make  _ better _ use of it that you can think of, though?”

“If you don’t want them—”

He mostly didn’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth. He had no delusions that he and Maggie would ever be  _ close _ again, but he was willing to be a little more than blandly civil if it might help repair his relationship with the girls. And besides, his pool of friends was limited enough that he was willing to take her pity squash— at least she was speaking to him.

“Nah, I want ‘em. I just figured you’ve got friends who bake and shit, so I wanna make sure they’re not being wasted on someone who’s probably gonna eat them raw.” 

“Trust me, there’s enough zucchini to go around.” He could hear the car beeping through the phone speaker as it was put in reverse. “I’ll be right up.”

Rust turned away from the computer and raised one eyebrow. “What is Maggie bringing up here?”

“Zucchini.” Marty shrugged. “I dunno, it sounded kind of like an excuse to make sure I’m not dying or living in squalor or something.”

Rust’s other eyebrow moved up to join its counterpart. “How did you  _ ever _ convince a woman that good to marry you?”

“Christ, Rust, if I knew that, we’d probably never have split.” 

Rust nodded and turned back to the computer.

A moment later, Maggie knocked, and Marty opened the door. She held out a tote bag full of shiny green summer squash, and looked Marty up and down with medical appraisal.

Marty took the bag. “Thank you, seriously.”

“No problem— I’m happy you’re taking them off my hands.” She nodded. “You’re looking better than last time.” 

“I should hope so,” Marty snorted. “Last time I still had a black eye.” He beckoned, as casually as he could. “Lemme put these in the fridge. You wanna come in, or, are you, uh, in a rush?” He shrugged, walking towards the kitchen. “There’s coffee.”

“Uh,” Maggie squinted, pushing hair off her forehead. “Sure, yeah. Just for a minute, though.”

She stepped past the threshold and stood very stiffly, looking straight forward into the kitchen.

“Hey Maggie. You want me to get you that coffee?” Rust offered, quietly, still writing.

She jumped slightly. 

“God, Rust, I’m—” She looked at him, and then into the kitchen again. “I didn’t even see you there, I’m sorry. How are you?”

He stood up, stretching carefully. “Just peachy. Coffee?” 

“I got it, Rust,” Marty yelled from the kitchen. 

“Guess he’s got it.” Rust pointed at the couch with his thumb. “You can sit, y’know.”

Maggie smiled tightly, and migrated to the couch. “You know, I wasn’t expecting you to be here, but maybe you can take some of the zucchini, then. I think it’s too much for one.”

“I’ll make sure it gets eaten,” Rust nodded, moving over to the armchair. 

Maggie glanced at the open computer. “So are you here working on a case?” 

Marty came back into the living room with a cup of coffee for Maggie and a cup for Rust. 

“Nah, he just never left.” He smirked at Rust before going to get his own cup. 

Maggie frowned, looking Rust over. “Are you still feeling poorly? I could definitely ask someone at the hospital to—”

His own cup in hand, Marty sat down on the other end of the couch, as distant from Maggie as he could physically be without joining Rust in the armchair. 

Rust interrupted her. “I’m good, but thank you for the offer.” 

He glanced at Marty from the corner of his eyes, like they were sharing a secret, and suddenly that’s what it felt like. That they knew something Maggie didn’t. Marty looked between her and Rust. Being in the same room with his ex-wife and the guy who had fucked his ex-wife, sharing coffee and small talk, should probably have been a more uncomfortable experience. Clearly Maggie was more than a little thrown off by this reunion.

But it hadn’t been Rust’s fault their marriage had ended, even if that’s how it had felt ten years ago. 

And it hadn’t been Maggie’s fault, either, even if that was an easier story to tell himself. 

He could be angry with them, still, if he wanted, but what good was it? He had fucked himself over worse than either of them ever had. 

Maggie drank nearly half her coffee in a single gulp. She looked back and forth between the two of them, eyes darting in a suddenly weary face.

“So, you’ve been staying here since last month?”

Rust nodded, expression unreadable.

Marty felt strangely self-conscious. Like somehow Maggie would know that—

He swallowed, just  _ daring _ himself to finish that thought. 

“I mean,” he shrugged, “he hasn’t signed a lease agreement, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I’m just…” She flattened her mouth and widened her eyes. “Well, I’m happy you’re getting along, is all.” She looked less happy and more shocked, like she figured they’d have strangled each other by now. 

Rust glanced at Marty again, mischief in the corners of his eyes.

No one seemed to have much of anything to say.

Marty gulped down some of his coffee and attempted to fill the silence. “Rust’s trying to teach me how to cook.” 

Maggie’s eyes darted to Rust, who was comfortably hunched over, leaning forward with his chin on his palm.

“He could barely make toast when we were married. How’s that going?”

“Slow,” Rust nodded. “But we haven’t burnt down the building.”

Even though it had been years since they lived together, it was impossible to forget someone’s body language after more than a decade of marriage. Marty could feel regret pouring off Maggie— she wished, violently, that she had not agreed to come inside. He kind of regretted asking, too, but he was only experiencing mild inconvenience rather than acute distress. 

“So, uh,” she tried to make small talk. “You’re working with Martin at the agency?” 

“Yeah. I’m not exactly a full employee yet, since I need to renew my PI license, and I haven’t been sober long enough for that.” 

Maggie looked a little surprised at something in that statement. Marty tried to remember— had he ever actually  _ told her _ Rust was an alcoholic? Or had he just sort of assumed she'd know? 

Rust smiled, almost beatific. Looking like a heroin addict Messiah. 

"One positive aspect of being in a coma is that I have no memory of going through withdrawal this time." 

Marty was pretty sure he was trying to be funny, but Maggie looked horrified. It wasn’t from naivete, not hardly— Marty was sure she had coaxed hundreds of drunks out of drowning in a bottle— but as a nurse, his passivity was surely alarming to her.

He seemed to realize this, and added, with an awkward flash of his teeth, "I'm hoping it'll stick this time around."

"We drink a  _ lot  _ of coffee," Marty grinned, lifting his cup up. “I haven’t slept since he got out of the hospital,” he joked before taking another sip.

Maggie nodded, her eyebrows darting upwards for a moment as she attempted an expression like a smile. 

She took another sip of her coffee, squinting into her cup. 

“So, Rust, once you’re back on your feet, are you thinking you’re going to stick around?” 

Rust looked over at Marty, his eyes moving from his knees to his face. For a moment, eyes locked with Rust’s, Marty felt like he was inside a soap bubble, contained, fragile, and silent. He was asking him a question, but which question it was, he didn’t know. They had never really addressed the fact that Rust had more-or-less officially moved in, not directly. Was he asking, now, if it was alright? 

Rust raised his eyebrows very slightly, and the bubble popped.

Marty answered for him. 

“I mean, we hadn’t really talked about whether this,” he gestured between himself and Rust, “is long-term or what—”

Maggie squinted, the side of her mouth pulling up in confusion. “I don’t mean  _ here _ , I just mean in town.” She laughed, looking at Marty like the two of them were sharing an inside joke. “Unless you’re going to be roommates permanently.”

She assumed he’d think the idea was funny.

That, Marty realized, was probably fair. He had never been good at forgiveness, and Rust was. Well, he was Rust. From her perspective, their truce had probably seemed temporary at best, and like something out of the Twilight Zone at worst. 

All she could see was the both of them, a decade younger, bruised and spitting blood, their names like acid in each other’s mouths. 

The memory that overwrote all that— his hands wet with blood, his face wet with sweat and Errol’s innards and his own tears, Rust’s head in his lap, his vision blurring as he touched his friend’s face, Rust’s labored breathing slowing and growing shallow, his own limbs trembling and fingertips growing cold, trying to stay alive just to keep  _ him _ alive— she would never know about. He had told her the sanitized version; they had both been injured, and he passed out before anyone came. The truest version— the version where, somewhere, just before he lost consciousness, he had squeezed Rust’s fingers and he had stopped squeezing back, and he had felt his heart fracture down the middle—  _ that _ version? That version he had barely allowed himself to hear.

Rust looked at Marty again, and Marty couldn’t look back, this time. He could already feel his pulse in his throat. He looked over his shoulder, into the kitchen, and then at his feet. 

He had no idea how much time had passed.

Putting his cup back down on the table, Rust turned to Maggie.

And he smiled, an insubstantial movement of perfect grace, the sad and gentle benediction of the resurrected.

“Nothing’s permanent, Maggie.”


	6. Week Ten

“Who the hell names their child ‘Nero,’” Marty sighed, reading over the rap sheet of one Nero Philemon Monroe. He tapped his fingers on the kitchen counter as he read. 

He could hear Rust stirring behind him, removing himself from the couch. 

“Violinists?” He walked over and peered around Marty’s shoulder at the file. “Or arsonists, maybe.”

He placed his hand on the small of Marty’s back as he read. 

Heat bloomed from back to front; in an instant the hair of Marty’s arms was raised and his stomach was doing gymnastics. Under duress, he might admit that he was relatively hands-on with Rust— he often threw an arm over his shoulders or touched his forearm or yanked his ponytail— but Rust almost never touched him first.

And now his chin was practically resting on his shoulder as he read, and his hand was hot on his back, and it was suddenly very hard to keep pretending that that didn’t  _ do something _ to him. 

Last week, Marty had woken up from an extremely explicit dream in which Rust had appeared rather prominently, and he had thrown on a pair of jeans and driven immediately out to the 24-hour liquor store. He drank about a third of a bottle of Kentucky Gentleman, sitting there in the parking lot, before he started to feel like he might die if he took another sip. Not drinking for two months, as it turned out, made binge drinking quite a lot harder. 

He had tried for an hour to work up the courage to go into a bar or a club or hell, a fucking hen house, and talk up the first woman who glanced at him, but instead he just kept coming up with reasons that was a terrible idea. He would probably strike out, for one. It had been an age since he last managed to pick a girl anywhere but a dating website. And even if he did manage to get into bed with someone, he was blind drunk and drowning in nervous sweat, so there was a real possibility he might not be able to get it up. All the other reasons kept coming back to Rust— he could hardly bring some drunk stranger back to their home— it was bad enough that he was drunk himself. And if he went to her place, it wasn't like he had left a note— would Rust worry?

And then of course, he felt even guiltier about feeling guilty about Rust, because he had spent  _ years _ banking on Maggie assuming he was just at work late. 

He had pounded miserably on the car horn for a while after that, until the owner of the liquor store had come out and told him to get the fuck out of his parking lot. 

And so he had driven across the street to the 24-hour fast food place, gotten a large order of fries, and searched on his phone,  _ "does having a sex dream about a guy make you gay?" _

He spent the next half hour trying variations on the same question and reading articles clearly intended for teenagers, alternating fries and sips of cheap-ass bourbon. The internet assured him that even the most staunchly heterosexual men could occasionally have unwanted male fantasies, and he briefly felt better until something in the back of his mind had whispered,  _ 'unwanted _ ?' and sent him down a new research spiral.

" _How do you know if you_ _want_ _to have a sex dream about someone_?" was not a fruitful search, and " _How do you know if you're gay_?" was an immediate dead end. He was pretty sure, despite the indelible images of Rust's lips and hands and— well, the images he was having a hard time drinking away— that he wasn't _gay_. He liked tits too much for that. 

One article recommended seeing if you had any reaction to gay porn, and, with the clumsy decisiveness of a deeply drunk man, Marty looked up gay porn. He nearly threw his phone into the windshield in panic when, predictably, looking up gay porn brought up images of men having sex with each other. Immediately, mortified, he had closed his browser and began the slow, cautious drive home. 

Feeling mildly reassured that he had not reacted positively to the wall of dicks he had unleashed, and that he was probably just sex-starved, he had managed to go back to sleep. 

But if it was relatively easy to excuse his unconscious fantasies, it was a bit harder to excuse what was happening now, in the light of day. He had been able to pretend, for a long time— from when they were partners, even, if he were really being honest with himself— that he couldn’t understand the message his body was trying to send him. But at this point, even pretending felt like an admission. 

He was warm all over, to the point of discomfort. He wanted to unbutton his shirt, but wondered if that might read as a come-on. He could feel his heartbeat in his extremities, and as Rust’s exhaled, softly, very close to his ear, he could feel the thudding of his blood starting to work its way downstairs as well. He wanted to scramble over the kitchen counter and hide behind something, like a cornered animal. He wanted to push Rust off him and run out the door. He wanted to cup Rust’s chin and kiss him. 

Doing that would  _ definitely _ be seen as a come-on. 

“Everything about his name is a mistake,” Rust mused, the hand that wasn’t on Marty’s back resting on the counter beside the file. “‘Nero Monroe’ rhymes, and ‘Philemon Monroe’ isn’t any better, with that repeated middle syllable.”

Marty managed to rasp, shoulders stiff, looking directly at the paper in front of him, “Maybe he goes by  _ Phil _ .” 

“I don’t believe in onomancy, but if I did, I would wager this man was cursed.” 

Goosebumps all over his arms, Marty made an attempt at laughter, but it came out like a cough. “You can’t really talk, Rust.” 

“What, that my name means ‘iron oxide burnable carbon?’” He raised his eyebrows. “I’ve heard it. Since primary school.” 

“Least ‘Cohle’s spelled differently.” 

He could not believe Rust’s hand was still there, hot on his flesh. 

He turned and looked at him so they were almost nose to nose, wondering if that might make him stop. Instead, Rust’s eyes darted down to his mouth with a blink, and then back up to his usual prolonged and uncomfortable eye contact. Marty found himself thinking about Rust’s eyelashes, and what it would feel like to kiss someone and feel the bristles of a moustache.

And then before he could do something stupid like find out, the moment was over, and Rust was looking at the file.

“So what’s the story on our boy Nero?”

“Oh, uh,” Marty swallowed, his throat filled with sand, “He’s a fence, mostly— been charged for petty theft, possession. But he knows, or, uh,” he swallowed again, unable to produce saliva. He rubbed the fleshy part where his thumb met his palm against his upper lip, feeling sweat collecting in the hollow below his nose. “He went to school with the kid who disappeared, and he’s on probation, so I figured he might talk.”

Rust nodded, his bottom lip between his teeth as he read. 

His hand was still on Marty’s back.

Marty thought about what his lips might taste like. Would it be tobacco and coffee? Or would he taste inexplicable, the way he described things— like the color green, or something?

“What angle are we taking?”

Marty pulled his eyes away from his friend’s face. 

“Can you still do that thing with people?” He ran his tongue roughly along his lower lip. “Get anyone to tell the truth?”

“Yes, but I hardly think I’m going to need to seriously interrogate this paranoid twenty year old.”

Marty shook his head. “Me neither.” 

He had been thinking about his own secrets. 

“Why, then?” Rust shifted his weight off the hand that was on the counter, and for a second, Marty could swear he feltl Rust’s fingertips digging deeper into the flesh of his back. “Is there someone else who needs to be compelled to tell the truth?” 

Somehow, the idea of Rust  _ compelling _ him brought his blood pressure somewhere deeply unsafe. Rust whispering something dark and secret and true, his lips brushing his ear. Rust leaning in too close, his hands closed over his wrists. Rust saying out loud the things he was still afraid to say to himself— doing all the hard work of self-realization and confession for him. Marty shifted uncomfortably on the bar stool, suddenly finding their proximity unbearable.

He wanted to step back two weeks into the past, when he could still ignore the fact that Rust was turning him into a goddamn homo. He wasn’t even  _ handsome _ , other than his eyelashes. And his cheekbones. And his arms. 

Marty wasn’t even sure why he suddenly had an opinion on what made a man handsome. Sure, he had checked out the equipment on his teammates in high school, but it was for comparison purposes— everyone did that. Whether or not a man  _ looked good _ to him or not was a question he had never answered before.

That a little voice in the back of his head questioned whether he had ever  _ asked _ it before was immaterial. Why  _ Rust _ of all people was making him question every interaction he had ever had with another man was the real issue, here, and— 

“Marty,” Rust murmured, cocking an eyebrow. “You having a stroke or something? Because I don’t know your blood type, or whether you’re allergic to any medication…” Despite the disturbing nature of his words, his tone was even and his pace was slow— a joke. 

“Sorry,” Marty shook his head. “I was just thinking about who else we’re going to need to talk to.” He smiled up at Rust as casually as he could. “An’ I’m allergic to azithromycin, but it just makes me puke. And I’m O+.”

“How’d you find that out?”

“The allergy?”

Rust nodded.

“Fell off the fucking roof of my high school and got a piece of scrap metal from the auto shop lodged in my thigh like an absolute fucking pinhead. They put me on antibiotics while the stitches were healing and I projectile vomited on a math test.” 

“The fuck were you doing on the roof?”

“Trying to impress girls. Why the fuck else does anyone do anything in high school?”

Rust licked his lips, eyes half-lidded and just a touch disdainful. “You and I did not have similar teenage experiences, Marty.” He crossed his arms, dissolving the point of contact between them. “And I’m AB-.”

“Of  _ course _ you’d be something weird like AB-.” 

Rust’s mouth shifted slightly to the side. “Well by that turn, makes sense you’d be common.” 

Marty pushed his chin out, affecting a defiant squint. “Well now that’s a fucking unfair value judgement. Just because I’m not an intellectual or I can’t… taste the color of the universe or whatever bullshit—”

Rust uncrossed his arms and very lightly touched Marty’s shoulder. “I’m joking.” His head was tilted down slightly, and he looked at Marty a little sideways, under his eyelashes. “I figured out you weren’t half as common as you played at a long fucking time ago.”

Marty felt himself going hot again.

_ Was this what fucking menopause was like? _

He laughed. “Is that a compliment?”

The ghost of a smile passed over Rust’s face. He recrossed his arms. “Partially.” 

“You’re such a fucking asshole,” he sighed, shaking his head. 

Rust leaned forward, so his crossed arms were resting on Marty’s shoulder. He blinked once, eyes on Marty’s face. “Guilty.” He looked down at Nero’s file. “Let’s get this shit done, alright?”

The warmth of his arms, his skinny chest against Marty’s back, the smell of smoke on his skin— without thinking, Marty reached up and touched his face, the backs of his fingers grazing Rust’s jaw. Rust let his eyes fall to the page in front of them, apparently unperturbed.

They talked shop while Marty burned inside. 

That night, unable to find a single part of his pillow that didn’t feel like a future pinched nerve, he gave up trying to corral his thoughts and just let his mind wander. Even if it would inevitably wander to Rust.

He let himself admit:  _ I want to fuck him. _ And with a pained, muffled groan into his pillow, he forced himself to admit:  _ I care about him. A lot.  _ If it were just one thing or the other— just the lust or just the affection, it wouldn’t be so bad. He could live with the fact that this  _ one _ dude made him horny, even if it also kind of made him want to light himself on fire. And he could live with the idea that he loved Rust, so long as he could spin it as some kind of band-of-brothers sort of love. But to live with both— to want to fuck him  _ and _ to feel that squeeze on his heart any time he smiled at him— it was too fucking much. 

He couldn’t remember another time he had felt this way, trapped under the twin curses of unrequited attraction and affection. There were chicks he had lusted over and lost, but he had never had any delusion that they  _ meant something _ to him. And of course there had been Maggie, but she had been  _ his _ . The closest feeling, he tossed, rolling to his other side, had been when Maggie had left the first time, and he had loved her still, and he had wanted her still, but even that wasn’t the same. Even in the depths of his drunken despondency, he had believed, intrinsically, that she would come back to him. 

But with this— there was nothing telling him Rust  _ owed _ him anything, and no bitterness in the back of his throat when he imagined what it would be like if they could be together. The guilt tasted different. He hadn’t wronged Rust, and he didn’t feel guilty about something he had  _ done _ — just shame over what he might  _ be _ . 

Because that was the crux of it, wasn’t it? If Rust were a woman, he’d probably have wanted to fuck him back in ‘95. Probably tried. Probably have ruined their relationship before it fucking started. 

But he wasn’t. 

And Marty wanted him anyway. 

Wanted him on his lap, pressed up hot and desperate against him, burning friction denim-on-denim, his hands in his hair and his mouth on his neck.

Wanted to feel his stubble on his lips, the sinews of his arms against him, to taste the smoke on him. 

Wanted to watch him, those tired blue eyes looking up at him from kneeling, his mouth busy with something other than philosophizing.

Wanted to know what he sounded like when he came undone.

He let it happen, hand down his boxers, his head spilling over with Rust. Pushed aside the self-loathing for the time it took to picture him, face down in the pillows, gasping and pliable. Ignored the guilt and the shame just long enough to imagine what it would be like to have him, all solid angles and antagonism, bundled up in his arms, squirming beneath him. He came with his teeth baring into the back of his hand, terrified that Rust would hear the slightest noise and know, somehow, what he was thinking about as he touched himself.

Every fluid ounce of brain space was instantaneously awash with revulsion.

Crushing his eyes shut and his teeth together, Marty peeled his boxers off and hurled them in the direction of the hamper. He wiped himself off and turned face down into the pillow, wondering how easily he might be able to smother himself. 

He wanted to beat the shit out of someone, or throw the microwave off the counter, or take his car and drive it into the nearest stop sign. He wanted to get so drunk he couldn’t stay upright, and black out somewhere far away from here, and wake up with a hangover so bad he couldn’t remember his name. He wanted to throw Rust’s door open and drag him onto the floor and demand he explain how he had turned him into a faggot. 

He wanted to cry.

But more than anything, he wanted to knock on Rust’s door, and sit on the side of his bed, and just fucking  _ tell him _ everything he was feeling. To have Rust rub his back and mutter some kind of nonsense bullshit about homosexuality in the animal kindgom and how guilt over sexual proclivities was a failing of society. For Rust to lie down beside him and make some humidity-sapping dry-ass joke, and for all of this to just feel the way it felt when they were side by side in the light of day. To be able to drape his arm around him and let it mean everything, friendship and love in equal parts.

But he didn’t do any of that.

Marty ripped his pillow out from under his head and threw it across the room, and fell asleep in a slowly cooling nauseous sweat. 


	7. Week Thirteen

“Shit.” Marty ran his forefinger down the shopping list, squinting. “Hun, can you go grab orange juice? I forg—” He looked up, realizing what he had just said.

Menace and amusement dripped in equal parts from Rust’s unfolding leer. 

“Sure thing,  _ darlin’ _ ,” he rumbled, winking pointedly as he turned away..

And he was gone before Marty could make an excuse or correct himself or throw himself in front of an oncoming train. 

He tried to head the conversation off as they were getting in line to pay, before they were actually  _ alone _ , where this would be a thousand times more awkward.

“Rust, you…” He grimaced, scrunching his mouth up. “You know that was a… total, unthinking accident, right?”

Rust plopped the orange juice into the cart and stared expressionlessly into Marty’s soul. 

“No shit.”

“I just… the only other person I’ve ever been grocery shopping with is Maggie,” he rambled, “So I guess it was some kind of kneejerk sort of…” He scratched the thinning hair at the back of his neck. “It was… not purposeful.” 

He wasn’t  _ lying _ , exactly. It hadn’t been purposeful. And he hadn’t ever gone grocery shopping with anyone other than Maggie (although even that was stretching it, since he had mostly never gone grocery shopping  _ period _ until they got divorced.) But he was hardly mistaking Rust for his ex-wife; he was mistaking  _ himself _ for Rust’s fucking boyfriend. 

Rust jammed his hand into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. “I know, Marty.”

“Like callin’ the teacher ‘mom,’” Marty continued, hands square out in front of him like he was handing Rust a tangible example.

“I get it,” Rust nodded, half-smiling with his mouth as he fingered the cash he had. His eyes looked tired. 

“I just don’t want to…” Marty pursed his lips. What?  _ ‘Don’t want to give you the correct impression that I’ve gone sissy and want to hold your goddamn fucking hand? _ ’ He sighed. “Don’t want to make you uncomfortable, or something.” 

Rust looked off in the direction of the exit. “Or something,” he muttered, paying no attention to Marty. 

They paid and left, and Marty began to feel like he should have just pretended nothing had happened. Rust seemed distant and moody, and not in the way he usually seemed distant and moody. More like he was angry. They way he used to get sometimes when he and Marty would disagree on some aspect of a case, and he would insist he was right until Marty told him to drop it or go fuck himself. They loaded groceries into the trunk and got in the car without speaking. The radio buzzed half-audible guitar as Marty pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. 

Rust pulled out a cigarette and looked at Marty. 

The corners of his mouth softened while his eyes narrowed deviously.

“Baby, can you roll down the window?”

Marty smacked him, hard, on the shoulder with the back of his hand. 

“Go fuck yourself, prick. Roll your own damn window down.”

Rust lit his cigarette and pressed the button on his door, still smiling.

And from that point on, Marty’s life became a litany of pet names.

Flipping through files on the counter: “Sweetheart, pass me my pen?”

One the way out the door: “I’ll be back in an hour, buttercup.”

Getting coffee,  _ in front of strangers _ : “Pumpkin, you got any ones?”

At the mother-fucking office: “You mind getting me the Gardner case file, Sugarplum?”

Complaining made it worse. Ignoring it did nothing. Marty was in hell. Under different circumstances, he might’ve even thought it was kind of cute; Rust had never struck him as the cutesy nicknames type, and hearing those words from his mouth had an immediate serotonin release reaction. Until, of course, he had to fake being pissed off  _ every single time _ so there would be  _ some _ kind of excuse for the reddening of his face and loss of his vocabulary. His dumb-fuck crush had become a running gag. 

Rust was an asshole, but Marty didn’t think he was quite enough of an asshole to purposefully hurt him in that way. He had to assume that Rust was totally oblivious to his stupid fucking feelings, and just thought it was a funny thing to happen between friends. 

So he tried to think of what would make it  _ stop _ being funny, and landed, like a child, on fighting fire with fire.

Rust licked his lips, a cigarette balanced between his fingers. He knew he wasn’t supposed to smoke in the office, but rules had never quite stuck to Rust the way they did to other people. He squinted at the computer screen, gears turning. “Sweets, can you come here?” He beckoned to Marty without looking at him. The pet names had become totally unconscious at some point; Rust called him everything but his name these days without even batting an eyelash.

“Sure,” Marty answered with an inhalation. He stepped over to Rust’s desk and leaned on the back of his chair. “What’s up, gorgeous?”

Rust glanced up at him and then continued. 

“We fucked up on this guy. He used to work for Ward Security, and he was promoted in 2009, so there’s no way he couldn’t have known about the faulty firearms.” 

No reaction. 

But Marty was determined to make himself as annoying as Rust had been if it meant he might stop.

Getting dinner at a roadside taco stand that night, he held up a scuffed red bottle in the glow of the flickering all-weather light. “Babe, you want hot sauce?”

Rust nodded, still unphased.

The next morning, standing in front of the coffee maker, he asked, “Hey good lookin’, dark roast or almond joy?” 

Rust looked at both bags of coffee and then pointed at the dark roast. 

Waiting in the lobby of a company serviced by Ward Security, he escalated to straight up flirting. He touched Rust’s sleeve. “I like this color on you.”

“Mm?”

“Compliments your eyes, cupcake,” he confessed, pretending he was lying. 

Rust looked down at his own shirt, a shade of green a little brighter and a little bluer than he usually wore. 

At the office, they exchanged a ‘hot stuff’ and a ‘sexy.’ If the other two guys who were in the room with them had previously suspected their boss was getting some on the side from his newest employee, Marty had to assume they were now convinced. He wondered how long it would be before the small-town rumor mill ground all this up into an airborne particulate that made its way back to his ex-wife or one of the guys from the precinct. He also wondered how likely he would be to sucker punch the first person who said anything about it. 

But so it went. 

Instead of Rust laying off, now they were both just calling each other cutesy-ass nicknames. Marty felt like he was playing a game of chicken that no matter what he did, he was going to lose. Rust was going to keep drawling ‘dearest’ and ‘buttercup,’ and every time, Marty was going to weigh the respective consequences of kissing him or sticking his tongue in an electrical socket. 

But if he hadn’t had his head so far up his own ass, he might have noticed that Rust was wearing a lot more bluish-green.


	8. Week Sixteen

Marty woke in a spongy haze, blurrily blinking himself back into existence to the sound of strangers’ voices. He turned his head in the direction of the chatter— it was just the TV. He had fallen asleep on the couch. He rolled his shoulders with an audible crack, and propped himself up. Rust was sitting in the armchair, one leg tucked under himself, his other foot on the edge of the seat. He leaned his ledger against his knee, sketching.

“Wh’time’s it,” Marty slurred, his mouth like the underside of a shoe. He stretched his jaw open and groped for the lukewarm glass of water on the table. 

“Twelve fifteen,” Rust answered, looking up for a second before returning to his drawing.

“Jesus,” Marty croaked. He gulped the water and licked his lips and the backs of his teeth. “I been asleep an hour and a half and you didn’t kick my ass off the couch?” 

Rust shrugged. 

Marty sat the rest of the way up, his joints complaining in surround sound. He rubbed at the corners of his eyes, blinking hard. When everything was a little less crusty, he watched Rust’s hand move across the paper, his eyes tracing the lines he laid down. 

He yawned. “What’re you drawing?”

Rust hesitated, his hand stilling. He looked up and caught Marty’s eyes over the coffee table, expression so expertly neutral that Marty felt for a second like he was about to be lied to. 

“You,” he answered, a slight downward nod of his chin as punctuation. He blinked once and went back to his drawing.

Marty snorted, half-assuming he  _ was _ lying, and half-panicked by his own immediate bodily response. His ears and neck were like downtown Lafayette in August, and his stomach may as well have been filled with squirrels. 

“You’re drawing me in my sleep?” He asked, laughing incredulously.

Rust tapped the tip of his pencil against his leg. 

“Sketching things out provides me with clarity,” he explained, speaking each word with cautious languidness, like he was writing a thesis statement.

Marty leaned back, crossing his arms tightly over his chest. “What d’you need clarity on me for?” 

Rust closed his notebook and shifted his weight, moving the opposite leg beneath him. 

“Why wouldn’t I need clarity on you?”

“I would just think…” He swallowed, suddenly feeling like he was developing an arrythmia. “You know me well enough that you’d have all the data you need already.” 

Rust pursed his lips very slightly. “Complacency is dangerous. If you can’t reassess and reconceptualize the people you’re closest to, you develop blind spots.” He stared dead ahead, looking at Marty like a problem to solve. “You’re becoming a blind spot for me.” 

Marty balked, feeling more than a little slighted. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I can’t see you with the clarity I require.” He bit the inside of his lip, still eyeing Marty like a puzzle. “For one, I’m not sure I can tell when you’re lying anymore. And I can’t tell whether it’s because you’re lying to  _ yourself _ or…” He exhaled, slowly and audibly. “Because I am.”

A sensation like gelatin setting oozed through Marty’s torso. He had been worrying about Rust’s human lie detector setting for weeks, but hearing it was on the fritz somehow worried him even more. Rust’s tone was unreadable, and Marty couldn’t help but feel like he was about to be subject to a battery of accusations.

He laughed, summoning as much mirth as he could through the tightening of his ribs and pinching of his sinews. His whole body felt like a leg cramp. 

“What the hell do I have to lie to you about, Rust? You’ve been seeing the airing of my dirty laundry since the fucking OJ trial. You live in my goddamn house.” 

Rust looked at the coffee table for a long time before answering. 

“I think you would know the answer to that better than I would.”

Marty scratched his neck, wondering how suspicious it would be to pick up and go to bed right at this very moment. 

“What the fuck do you think I’m hiding, Rust, honestly?” 

“I think you’re scared of something.” He tilted his chin up slightly.

“Of what?” He bluffed. “What the fuck is there for me to be scared of?”

“Well, if I’m right,” Rust began, gaze unwavering. Marty may have made a mistake trying to bluff him. “You’re scared of yourself, more than anything. But if I’m wrong, it might not really be fear at all. If I’m wrong, I could be mistaking the texture, the feeling of what keeps pouring off you for fear when it’s actually…” His eyebrows stretched upwards, his eyes closing. “Revulsion, maybe. Loathing.”

Marrty tried to turn it back on him. “Well… did you figure it out?” He gestured to Rust’s notebook and affected as sarcastic a tone as he could muster. “Did drawing me make you feel clear on the topic of whether or not I’m afraid of myself?”

“No.” Rust looked down at his ledger. “But talking to you right now is.”

When he looked back up, his eyes had the set they would get when he was talking to a suspect. Like his empathy had crawled deep into the darkest part of him and would crawl back out when it was safe. Like he was running half on autopilot, splitting himself so he could stay distant and objective even as he splintered and unraveled the suspect with their own damn knife.

Marty lost his temper. 

“The fuck, Rust, you got something to say to me, say it to my fucking face.” He picked up one of the throw pillows and tugged at its sides with his fists before tossing it on the ground. “Don’t you dare pull an interrogation room on me, alright? We got too fuckin’ much between us for those kind of games.”

“Tell me then, Marty,” Rust rebutted, answering with the quickness of anger, but not the volume. “What is it we have between us?”

Marty clenched his jaw and jutted his chin out, his lips locked in a sneer he hoped to god read as defiant and not petulant. 

“I don’t fucking know, Rust.” 

“Why? What don’t you know?”

“Give that shit a  _ fucking rest _ , alright!?”

“You won’t talk about it?”

“That’s not  _ it _ , Rust, it’s not. It’s not about talking or not talking, it’s about how you’re questioning me like a fucking suspect and not talking to me like your goddamn  _ friend _ .” He squinted, glaring at Rust with one side of his mouth open and his tongue pressed up against the back of his teeth. He wanted to spit. “If we’re going to talk about ‘ _ what we have between us _ ’ or whatever the fuck, then we’ll talk the shit out of it, fine, but you’re not gonna make a fucking  _ case _ out of it.”

Rust stared at him for a long time, unblinking, and Marty wondered just how badly he had fucked up. 

And then he looked down, and pushed a stray bit of loose hair behind his ear.

When he looked back up, he stated, very plainly: “I’m sorry.”

Marty hadn’t been expecting an apology.

He snorted. “Jesus, this is serious shit. I thought being Rust Cohle meant never having to say you’re sorry.”

Rust unfolded himself from the armchair and lifted his ledger from the table. 

“It’s late.” He closed his eyes and breathed out through his nose. “I think maybe this is a conversation for the light of day.”

“What?” Marty shrugged, one hand, palm up. “Rust, I don’t even know what the fucking parameters of this conversation are. You bring this shit up and now you— you fucking leave me in suspense like you’re gonna passive-aggressive me to death. I don’t want to go to sleep thinking you don’t fucking trust me anymore or you think I’m lying to you or some shit like that.” 

One eyebrow arched up for a split second, Rust chewing at his lower lip. 

“You been reading marital handbooks? ‘Never go to bed angry?’”

“Yes, Rust,” Marty sighed, autopilot engaging at the mere hint of a joke. “I have. I don’t want a second divorce, especially since you still haven’t even kissed me.”

Rust’s toneless neutrality dissolved, his face contorting this way and that as he looked off in the direction of his bedroom. He blinked rapidly and did something inexplicable with his free hand, bobbing it up and down, palm outstretched, like he was weighing a bag of flour. 

“It’s shit like  _ that _ , Marty.” He turned and looked at him, shaking his head slightly. “You joke around— you say shit like that— but every time I so much as brush you you fucking flinch.” 

Marty’s brain latched on to the only part of that statement he was currently capable of processing.

“I flinch?”

“Yeah, like I’m gonna give you fucking cholera.” He said it like a joke, but the set of his teeth said otherwise.

The ache through Marty’s body subsided, and his stomach rolled. He had no idea his squirreliness read as fucking  _ flinching _ . He just hadn’t wanted Rust to know he was hot for him— not make him think he was fucking repelled by him. 

He bit his lip and uncrossed his arms.

“C’mere.” 

With a look of minor annoyance, Rust stepped two paces towards him, around the corner of the coffee table. 

Decisively, he reached for Rust’s hand, clasping his fingers to his palm.

And then he froze, because he had not planned any farther than that, and now he was just sitting on the fucking couch holding his roomate’s hand like a fucking turkey. 

Rust looked at their hands and then at Marty, one corner of his mouth tweaked up slightly in confusion. He glanced back down at their hands.

“Marty, what the fuck are we doing?”

“I don’t fucking know!” Marty snapped, squeezing Rust’s fingers way too hard. 

Rust looked over his shoulder. “If you want to hold hands, we can hold hands, but this seems like a weird fucking way to do it.” 

Marty released his grip on Rust’s hand and grabbed his wrist instead. He wrenched him down onto the couch so hard Rust dropped his ledger, then grabbed him hard by his belt, and pulled him half onto his lap, Rust’s knee between his legs, his other foot still grazing the ground for balance. Rust may have been skinny, but he was also just about the strongest motherfucker Marty had ever met. If he had any intention of resisting, Marty probably wouldn’t have any front teeth at this point. So he cupped his hand over the back of Rust’s neck and pulled him down hard, crashing their mouths together. Rust’s moustache was scratchy against his face, and where their chins and cheeks met five-o’-clock shadow rubbed velcro-rough, and Rust tasted like an ashtray. And Marty pulled him closer, wanting to feel every bit of that roughness. 

Rust pulled his other leg up onto the couch and properly straddled Marty, and Marty was instantly seeing stars. He ran his hand up under the untucked front of Rust’s shirt, although he wasn’t quite certain what the protocol was with no bra to unhook and no breasts to fondle. He just let his hand rest on Rust’s ribs, his skin warm under his fingertips. Rust pressed his tongue into his mouth and Marty looped his fingers in the hair escaping from the base of Rust’s ponytail, and they stayed like that for a while, thighs together, noses bonking, lips and tongues bruising up against each other.

Eventually they parted, lips and then noses brushing once more as they pulled away, and their eyes met, and then suddenly Marty realized that they were going to have to  _ talk _ , and all the warmth drained from his body, replaced by the incessant pounding of his heart.

He looked down, which didn’t really help, because down was where Rust’s crotch was pressed up against his own.

“Shit,” he swallowed, eye contact impossible. He scratched the back of his head. “You know I’m not gay, right?”

“You are such a fucking piece of work,” Rust sighed. He grabbed Marty’s chin, roughly, and tipped his head up. “Is your heterosexuality going to prevent you from going forward with this, yes or no?”

“No, I,” Marty sputtered, his brain a garbage disposal, “I— I want this, I just—” He cleared his throat. “It’s not because I’m gay.” 

Rust shook his head slightly and let go of Marty’s chin, just to run the tips of his fingers down the front of his throat, hooking them in the collar of his shirt. Marty closed his eyes and swallowed. 

“Why the hell am I attracted to you?” He leaned in and kissed the side of his neck, right under his ear.

“Beats me,” Marty snorted. “It’s a mystery on this end, too.” 

Talking into his neck, Rust muttered, “Just to be clear, I was right— this is why you’ve been so fucking weird recently?” 

Marty found himself trying to undo Rust’s belt buckle as he spoke, the sensation of his lips moving across his neck propelling him to get him as naked as possible as quickly as possible.

“Yup.”

“And is the issue  _ just _ the self-loathing and internalized homophobia, or is there something more specific I should be concerned is at play here?” Marty managed to get his belt undone and unbutton his fly. He tugged the back of his shirt out from where it was half-tucked into his pants and pulled it up over his head. Rust obliged, even as he kept talking. “If it’s merely a problem of your perceived masculine worth I can live with that, although you better fucking keep it out of the bedroom, but if it’s… lingering resentment over our shared history, or if—” 

“This is the  _ weirdest _ fucking dirty talk I have ever experienced,” Marty grumbled, his hand on the back of Rust’s neck, and his mouth on the hollow of his throat. “Is there a way to get you to stop, or is this something I’m just going,” he kissed him, just above his clavicle, “to have to get used to?”

Rust breathed in slowly, eyes shutting for a moment as Marty started sucking on his neck. “Answer my question and maybe I’ll be quiet,” he lied. 

Marty dragged his lips across the top of Rust’s shoulder and then sat back, looking him in the eye. 

“It’s just the homo shit.” 

“Would you consider yourself closeted, or is this just something new that you haven’t quite processed yet?” 

Marty kissed his chest. 

“I thought you said you’d be quiet.”

“I said I  _ might _ be.” He pinched the front of Marty’s shirt between his thumb and forefinger. “Take this off.”

Marty did as he was told. “I don’t know. I just don’t see myself like that, y’know?” 

Rust placed his hand on the middle of Marty’s chest, and then leaned in to kiss him, hard. 

“What the fuck,” he questioned, pulling away with Marty’s lower lip pinched between his teeth, “does ‘like that’ even mean, Marty?” 

Marty gasped at the love bite and pulled Rust’s belt out of the loops in his jeans and threw it on the floor. He wasn’t  _ quite _ distracted enough to not see that this question was a trap.

“I just wouldn’t choose to label myself that way, no shame on anyone who does.”

Rust snorted and sat part of the way up, enough to pull his jeans down. 

“But you wanna fuck me.” 

Making a mental note that he had last been checked over at the hospital just a few months ago, and that therefore the hammering in his chest was  _ probably _ nothing to be concerned about, Marty placed his hand over the bulge in Rust’s briefs. It felt… well, it felt like a dick. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting— terror? Some kind of revelation from on high that, actually, he  _ was _ gay, and that he had been waiting to touch another man’s junk his whole life? An alien lifeform? But like one sleeved forearm felt an awful lot like another sleeved forearm, it turned out a dick felt an awful lot like a dick. Perhaps more surprising was that this realization didn’t make it any less un-fucking-believably hot to be touching him like that. 

“For some fuckin’ reason,” he grinned.

Rust brought his lips to Marty’s ear, his voice a whisper of a growl as Marty stroked him, “You want me to touch you.”

Marty grunted acquiescence and Rust unbuttoned his pants, his lips still pressed to his ear.

“You want me to blow you.” 

“Christ, Rust,” he groaned, this kind of talk going right to his dick.

“You want to get your hands all over me,” he breathed, grinding now into Marty’s hand. 

“Fuck,” Marty bit, needing very badly to be out of his jeans. He nudged Rust up for a second, hand on his ass, in order to wriggle enough of himself out of his pants, and then pulled Rust back down so they were pressed together with just the fabric of their underwear between them.

Rust continued his increasingly husky-voiced litany of deeds, his tongue brushing up against the curve of Marty’s ear before he spoke. “You want your cock inside me.”

“Rust…”

“You want to suck me off.”

“God, fuck,” Marty swore, one hand on Rust’s neck, the other on his ass, pulling him in, crushing their bodies together. 

Rust sat up straight and licked his lips, eyes locked with Marty’s, and Marty thought he might either come, or have a heart attack, or maybe both. 

And then a smirk unfolded, and Rust pulled back the elastic waistband of Marty;s boxers, freeing his erection. 

“Then you’re not entirely straight, darlin’.” 

“Oh, fuck  _ off _ ,” Marty sputtered, half laughing, half livid. 

Rust grinned— really grinned— all mischief and impunity. He sat up and pulled his briefs down past his hips, and then returned to straddling Marty. He kissed the side of his neck and ground his hips against him. Marty grabbed him by the ponytail and pulled him, relatively gently, off his neck, and then kissed him again. He pressed his tongue into Rust’s mouth as their cocks slid together, every inch of him flooded with brain-rotting lust. Rust’s hands rested, one on his hip and the other on his jaw, and he gripped Rust’s back and ass for leverage. When he came— and it was not long before he did— he felt the splatter on his stomach, and Rust made a quiet sort of noise against his mouth. Rust thrust harder against him, pulling back from their kiss to look down. Marty circled his hand around Rust’s cock, less stroking him than letting him fuck his palm, and then he was gone, over the edge, too, and Marty found himself doubly splattered. 

When they ground to a halt, both of them breathing a little heavy, Marty kissed the corner of Rust’s mouth and then slumped back, boneless.

They glanced at each other from under half-lidded eyes, almost shy. 

Marty smiled a crooked smile, looking down.

“Well, that was a lot of firsts,” he laughed. 

Rust pursed his lips slightly. “Pretty alright for a straight guy.” He gestured to the mess on Marty’s stomach with his eyes, brows raised slightly. “I think it’s a good look for you.”

Marty snorted. “Don’t fuckin’ push it, Rust.”

Very softly, Rust leaned down and pressed his lips to Marty’s. It felt a little different than it had before, like the desperation had drained out and all that was left was tenderness. Marty brushed the hair from Rust’s forehead and smiled.

And then Rust grabbed Marty’s discarded t-shirt from the couch and used it to wipe both of them off.

“What the  _ fuck _ , Rust, that’s disgusting.”

“The great thing about doing your own laundry,” he shrugged, “is that you don’t have to worry about anyone seeing your sex clothes but you.” He removed himself from Marty’s lap and pulled his pants up. 

Marty scowled. “Use your own shirt next time, then.”

“I would’ve if you hadn’t thrown it halfway across the room,” Rust rebutted, tucking his thumbs into his front pockets. 

Marty hitched his hips up and repositioned his boxers, then zipped up the front of his jeans. “Can I ask a dumb question?” 

Rust picked his notebook up from where it had fallen on the floor and stuck in on the edge of the table. He turned to Marty with his eyebrows slightly raised. “If you feel the need to ask stupid questions, I won’t stop you.”

Marty let his gaze pour down Rust, without the guilt chaser, for the first time. The man was still so fucking slim, even after all these years— the lines on his face and the grey in his hair betrayed his age, but to look at him from the neck down, he did not look like a man in his fifties. Marty glanced down at his own round belly, a solid and unwavering companion these past few years. He felt just the tiniest bit self-conscious until he thought about Rust whispering obscenity in his ear as he pressed his cock up against him, and came to the conclusion that Rust probably didn’t care about his gut. 

“You’ve uh…” He cleared his throat. “Done this kind of thing before? Messed around with guys?”

“Yes.”

He didn’t elaborate further.

“Follow-up question. Was this like… I better pretend in the morning I ain’t seen your dick, or… you wanna… y’know, make this a regular thing?” 

“Lemme ask you a question in response.” Rust leaned over Marty, his hands planted behind his shoulders on the back of the couch. “You think you can unring that bell?” He raised his eyebrows, and then pushed himself back up to standing in one smooth motion.

Marty stood up after him, his back making a slightly concerning noise, and grabbed Rust around the waist. 

Arms looped around his middle, Marty pressed the bridge of his nose into Rust’s neck. Rust extricated his arms from Marty’s grasp and draped them over his shoulders.

“Now this is getting downright tender, Marty,” he warned, a smile in his voice. “I’m starting to feel like all those pet names you been calling me weren’t a joke, after all.”

“Fuck off,” Marty muttered into the warmth of his neck. He kissed him, softly, where his jaw met his ear. “Like you didn’t fuckin’ start that bullshit.” 

Holding him, standing warm, chest to chest in the middle of the living room, like a slow dance without the motion, Marty found himself with a hundred more questions. Most of them were dumber than the ones he had already asked. He would save those for other nights. 

He asked the one that mattered in the here and now.

“You gonna stay the night?”

“I live here. I should fucking hope so.” Rust’s cheek was pressed against the side of his head. 

“Don’t willfully misconstrue my words,” he grumbled, lips against Rust’s skin. “I mean with me.”

“You asking me to  _ cuddle _ ?”

“F’you’re gonna be weird about it, no.” He pulled Rust closer by the waist. “Think of it as a way to save on heating bills.”

Rust snorted. “You’re such a fucking sophist.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a fucking pretentious asshole, so.” Marty pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows, daring Rust to correct him.

Instead, Rust just smiled. 

And for a little while longer, they stayed like that: quiet and still, two people who understood each other with an uncommon kind of rawness. And that night, when Rust draped his arm around Marty’s waist, the noise in his brain fizzled out to almost nothing. Everything about the situation should have been unbearably bizarre, incurably uncomfortable— there was a fucking  _ man _ lying next to him in his bed— a man he had seriously contemplated strangling on more than one occasion— a man who had, for all intents and purposes, catalyzed the end of his marriage. Instead, it felt very much the same as working through a case together, or hell, like standing back to back in a firefight. 

He pulled Rust a little closer.

“Synchronicity,” Rust mumbled, as if he was reading his mind.

“Hrm?”

“Just thinking back to when we first met.” His thumb traced a line down Marty’s flank. “That familiarity, y’know? I thought you were such a fucking blowhard—” He stopped, making a noise vaguely adjacent to a chuckle. “Probably because you  _ are _ —”

“Alright there, Mr. Roadtrip Philosophy Degree, sure,  _ I’m the blowhard _ .”

“—but even then, you were like a thorn that felt worse to pull out than keep in. Working with you should’ve been such a fucking slog, but it wasn’t. I knew you had my back, even when I was pretty sure you hated my guts.”

“Well, yeah, you were my fucking partner.” 

Rust was quiet for a second. Marty watched the ceiling fan slowly spin in the dark as Rust’s thoughts coalesced, his hand on his ribs. He could feel the bundle of scar tissue from where he had been shot, years before, and thought about Rust’s theory of people trying to fill each other’s holes. They had matching holes, now, although Rust’s was merely an addition to his existing collection. He thought about leaning over and kissing his forehead, but wanted to let him finish his thought, first. 

“After I quit, did they assign you a new partner?”

Marty nodded, grunting agreement. 

“And was it like that with him?”

From someone else, if might have sounded like jealousy, but from Rust, it was a leading question. No, it had not been. Of course it had not been.

“Nah, Rust,” Marty sighed. “You’re kind of a singular experience.”

“No synchronicity?” 

“No synchronicity,” Marty agreed. And then something got stuck in the flue of his thought process. “Wait. Fucking— weeks ago, like two fucking months ago— you said something to me about people who you know, right when you meet them, that they’re going to matter to you someday.”

Rust nodded. “Yeah. No shit. That’s what I’m talking about right now.”

“I know, I just…” Marty made a noise of displeasure low in his throat, not sure how to phrase what he wanted to say without sounding like a soppy bonehead. “You made it sound like you were talking about me and Maggie. But you were fucking talking about you n’ me, weren’t you?”

“I’ve spent a lot of time overestimating your ability to comprehend subtext, recently, Marty.” 

“Get fucked.”

Rust dug his fingertips into the soft flesh of Marty’s side, not unpleasantly. “You offering?”

Marty swatted his hand away and elbowed him, hoping he couldn’t see his growing smile in the dark. He rolled onto his side, away from Rust.

Briefly, the thought occurred that he had gone too far somehow, and then Rust followed, his chest to Marty’s back, his hand coming to fall on his belly. The part of his brain that was fucking stupid asked how he ended up the little spoon, but the part of his brain that was horny told it to shut the fuck up and enjoy himself.

Rust’s breathing was quiet and even, and Marty felt himself drifting, despite everything.

Before sleep took him, he asked one last stupid question.

“Rust… when you came back here. An’, y’know, asked me to help you.” He drowsily gathered his thoughts before they slipped like silvery minnows into his subconscious. “I asked you a bunch of times why you really did, and you never really gave me a straight answer.”

Rust murmured understanding.

“Did you… was this part of why you came back?” He felt himself going red in the dark, realizing how fucking needy a question like that sounded. “Did you think we were gonna end up… y’know, like this?”

If Rust hadn’t responded to the first half, Marty would have thought he was asleep. He took his time answering.

“I thought I was going to be dead.” Rust remained very still as he spoke. “I came back here with the intention of making this place my grave.” 

Marty clasped his hand over Rust’s. He had already explained that— that he had expected to die at Errol’s hands— but he hadn’t put it together with his purpose for returning. He had no idea how to respond other than to twine their fingers together. No wonder the man had trouble with his drink.

“But,” Rust breathed, the bridge of his nose pressed into Marty’s neck, his voice warm and a little husky, “I can live with this version of events.”


	9. Who's Fucking Counting, Anyway

“Hun, did you write down where this place is?”

“I texted it to you. Use your damn GPS.”

“Nielson said there’s no signal out there— did you just fucking tune him out again?”

“When he talks I just hear fucking radio static,” Rust snorted, grabbing his ledger from the kitchen counter. 

Marty glanced at him over his shoulder. “Wait, are you coming with me?”

“Thought I might keep you company.”

“Can’t ever just take a quiet fucking drive, can I?” 

“There’s something I want to see at the old factory building. I need to get another look where they say the fire started from. Something’s not right.”

“Drive yourself there, then,” Marty scoffed. “It’s almost an hour out of the way.”

Rust shrugged, a tiny motion paired with a languorous blink. “The Laotian place you liked is right near there. I’ll buy you dinner.”

“Fine.” Marty grabbed his keys and gestured at Rust with them. “But if you bring up that batshit ‘quadripartite gospels’ theory, you’re walking home.”

Rust pursed his lips slightly as he followed Marty out the door. “Every one of Bostick’s followers who was arrested at the fire all insist there’s a final phase we haven’t seen yet, and that the fire was—”

“Only the end of the third phase, I know.” Marty rolled his eyes. “So you keep telling me, but until we have even the barest scrap of actual, physical evidence and not just your overactive soothsaying gland acting up again, we’re a little stuck, since we can’t exactly investigate something that hasn’t fucking started.” 

He glanced back at Rust as they made their way down the stairs, and grabbed at the hem of his sleeve. “I like this— is it new?”

“Well, the guy I’m seeing has kind of a history of infidelity, so I like to do what I can to keep his interest,” Rust smirked, all darkness and the barest hint of teeth.

Facing forward, Marty held his hand up, middle finger aloft, back to Rust. “Go fuck yourself.”

“I’m right about Bostick,” Rust insisted as they got to the bottom of the stairs. 

“You probably are,” Marty sighed, unlocking his car from the keyfob, “Since you’re usually right when real weird-ass shit is going down, but I’m too fucking tired for a metaphysical investigation right now.”

Rust looked around the parking lot, and lowered his voice. “You’re the one who wanted to fuck at two in the morning.”

Waiting to respond until they were both in the car, Marty rebutted, “And I was only  _ awake _ at two in the morning because you started talking at midnight and wouldn’t shut up until my dick was in your mouth.” 

He jutted his chin out and gave Rust an exasperated look from under his eyelashes, and then started the car. Rust tried not to smile, but Marty could see the ghost of a dimple in his cheek. Before he put the car in drive, he scanned the parking lot, and swiftly leaned in to kiss Rust there.

“Baby, one of these days someone is going to see us, y’know.” Rust watched him shift and pull the car out of the parking lot with stirring affection, and more than a little bit of mischief. “You think your downstairs neighbor with the fuckin’ rosary beads gives us the stink eye  _ now _ …” 

“Yeah, well, fuck her.” Marty turned over his shoulder to check behind before merging onto the road. “May she see me with my hand down your pants and have a heart attack. Serves the old banshee right for denting my bumper.”

Out on the highway, Marty groaned audibly as they passed a billboard plastered with smiling twenty-somethings in mortarboards. 

“ _ Shit _ . I still need to buy something for Maisie’s fucking party,” he groused. 

“You’re officially going?”

“I officially have no good excuse not to, I just hate her fucking friends.” He flopped his head back and breathed in deeply. “It’s like being in detention. They all talk to me like I’m fucking eight and can’t pass a spelling test.”

“Sounds like you just have some hangups about teachers, Marty.” 

“I don’t have to stay long, right? She probably doesn’t want me to stay long.” He nodded to no one in particular. “Just pop in, congratulate her on grad school, give her a gift, get some fucking cheese and crackers, make awkward small talk with a bunch of intellectual twenty-somethings for five minutes, and get out of there.”

Rust made a face, but didn’t say anything.

Marty clenched his jaw. “Don’t you fucking start, okay?” He and Rust argued over everything, endlessly, but it came from a place of affection. Rust only ever got quiet and broody on the topic of Marty’s kids. It’s not like he didn’t understand why, but trying to rebuild a pair of relationships he had royally fucked up even  _ before _ he straight up fucked off for ten years wasn’t exactly like boiling water. “I’m trying. I’m really trying. I just…” He put his signal on to pass the car in front of them, a tired old Buick that seemed to be stuck in first gear. “You know when you made a new friend, like, in junior high, and before you got real close, there was this, uh… period of time where you started to feel like,  _ oh shit _ , I gotta make sure not to do anything dumb, ‘cause this person kind of thinks I’m alright, and I wanna keep it that way?”

“I guess?”

As soon as Rust answered, Marty realized he probably _ didn’t _ know that feeling, either because he was Rust and didn’t really tailor his behavior to other people, or because he went to junior high with four moose and a brown bear. He sighed and continued anyway. “That’s how I feel right now with Maise n’ Audrey. Like they’re just starting to think I’m not  _ actually _ the world’s worst human being, and every conversation we have is a fucking minefield of possibilities for me to prove that, yes, actually, I am  _ exactly _ as much of a catastrophe as they think I am.”

Rust quietly put his hand on Marty’s leg. He took a deep breath in, pinching the inside of his lip and cheek between his teeth. “I don’t know if this will make you feel better or worse, but…” He shrugged, just one shoulder. “You’re probably gonna fuck up, at some point.”

“Wow, thank you for the pep talk.”

“Let me fucking finish. But I doubt you’ll ever fuck up as spectacularly as you did in 2002, so the bar is already low.” 

“You’re terrible at this.”

“Shut up. The big difference here is that, when you do fuck up? You’re gonna apologize, and you’re gonna keep trying. And it might not be perfect, but it’s still better than you had before, right?”

Marty scratched at the side of his neck. 

“Yeah.” He nodded, eyebrows raising in surprise acquiescence. “Yeah, you’re right.”

Rust squeezed Marty’s thigh, and Marty took one hand off the wheel to take his hand. They interlaced fingers, palm to palm, Rust’s thumb rubbing rough and calloused on top of Marty’s. 

“Hey, y’know,” Marty began, surprising himself, “I was actually told I could bring a plus one.” In fact, he was always being told he could bring a plus one— Maggie seemed to insist upon it any time the girls invited him somewhere. He assumed it was to balance out the new Mister What’s-His-Face; they could seem like perfectly normal, functional exes if he had a new Missus What’s-Her-Name himself. He had never mentioned this to Rust because Rust hated parties and small talk, and also because bringing his roommate as his plus one seemed gay enough that other people might notice. He asked anyway. “You have any interest in coming with me?”

Rust glanced at him from the corners of his eyes.

“I realize parties aren’t exactly your scene, I’m just…” He shrugged his shoulders. “Extending the invitation.”

Looking out the windshield, Rust’s eyebrows went up, very slightly.

“You’re not worried how that’ll look?”

Marty pressed his tongue against the back of his teeth, pursing his lips. “Hey, plus one doesn’t necessarily mean significant other. I’m sure there’ll be people attending with friends.”

“Yeah, probably the twenty-somethings.” Rust turned and watched his facial expressions, gauging how much farther to push this inquiry. “What were the exact words Maggie said when she told you to bring someone?”

“I don’t know,” Marty snapped, remembering her exact words very clearly.

“Sixty-forty on it being either ‘bring a date,’ or ‘bring a lady friend.’” 

Marty rolled his eyes and sighed, a great exasperated heaving. “It was ‘bring a date.’”

Without breaking his stare, Rust pulled his lighter and carton from his pockets and rolled down the window. He looked down briefly to place a cigarette between his teeth and light it. 

“You know I don’t care, but you’re gonna have to play real fuckin’ dumb with Maggie if she asks about your choice of  _ date _ .”

“You know what?” Marty lied, hoping by saying the words out loud he could convince himself of their truth. “That’s fine. They’re all gonna fucking figure it out eventually, right?”

Rust laughed quietly, blowing smoke from his nose. “Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be this weekend.”

“Well, I’m not saying we’re gonna go in there holding hands and calling each other ‘pookie,’ Rust, it’s not a fucking coming out party.” He shrugged again. “I just want you to be there, okay?”

Rust made a face Marty couldn’t quite name, like a smirk that had gotten a little self-conscious. He blinked slowly and took a long drag on his cigarette, cheeks still pulled up by a smile. 

“Alright.” He turned to meet Marty’s gaze, eyes blue like stone. Something of the brittleness had gone out of him, recently. He tapped ash out the window and smiled. “Then I’ll be there.” 


End file.
